KaviSpeak कवि-उवाच

English and Hindi poetry and prose, published as well as experimental. Book reviews, essays, translations, my views about the world and world literature, religion, politics economics and India. Formerly titled "random thoughts of a chaotic being" (2004-2013).

Sunday, January 18, 2015

"Dhoni Stifled By the Lack of Later Dasher in the Team", says Monga, in his latest article on Cricinfo. India lost its match against Australia, and it was too obvious that a lack of big-hitter at number six hurt India's chances. Sadly it seems that this could remain the script for Indian losses in this world cup. I believe the selection of the final fifteen was not made on merit. It did not account for either the recent form or level of experience at this level or even fitness of the players. The backroom politics, big money, IPL scum and scams, petty regional and filial feelings, and the obscure love for bureaucratic mediocrity, all are to blame.

Maybe someone needs to go to the courts, even if it is to the virtual ones, and ask the following questions from Dhoni, selectors, BCCI board, the Sports Ministry and the machinery that punishes tax evaders, rule breakers, etc:

(a) Dhoni and BCCI selectors: why not pick the in-form batman, all rounder, one of the best finisher in the game, Man of the Series in the last world cup?
For everyone who follows Indian cricket, domestic and international, the very idea that somehow Yuvraj does not make the cut, is quite inexplicable. Maybe as inexplicable as the conflict of interest with a selector father and selected (poor on pitch / poor on paper or POP, POP) son... Yes, we all know. These days, Yuvraj is no selector's Binny, while Stuart Singhs, POP POP is King!

(b) Bring all your calculators, selection metrics, performance cards from all formats of the game, and justify the inclusion of Stuart Binny over a long list of more consistent performers, both with bat and ball. I can easily list Murali Vijay, Yuvraj Singh, Robin Uthappa, Manish Pandey, Rishi Dhawan, Ashok Dinda, Manoj Tewari, etc ). Yes yes, I know, we have a bowling all rounder and POP POP can swing!

(c) Can somebody explain to me how Srinivasan and Dhoni navigate through conflict of interest issues? Who is not bothered by the fact that BCCI officials are IPL team owners, and run for profit companies that own IPL teams, and the same IPL teams have players who are their employees on roll on their other companies. Can anyone take charge and act soon to punish the teams, the players and the officials involved in the IPL scam? Prime Minister Sir, here is a perfect example to set for fair play and AAP party, here is a perfect example of a labyrinth in the search of a broom.

(d) What is the criteria for picking selectors and what is the criteria for selection if all the consistent performances in a domestic competition usually go unnoticed and will not get you a call to the national team? How many players in the current team have played their fair share of Ranji trophy and domestic cricket? How many have first class records unmatched by the domestic performers who are consistently overlooked?

Like most of the fans of Indian cricket, I also keep hoping against hope that in spite of all this, the Indian team will prevail. I also hope it will continue to find a string of stellar performances from Sachins, Rahuls, Anils, Sauravs, Jagwals, who thrive in spite of the system. Even for the World Cup in 2015, I have hopes for one or more exceptional performances from that fiery Kohli, focused Bhuvaneshwar Kumar, persevering yet underrated Rahane, workhorse Ashwin, amazing in ODIs, dud in tests Rohit Sharma, and the Indian Cements employees/ Chennai Superkings mascots (Raina, Dhoni, Jadeja). Sometimes all it takes is two great performances in a match, one from a batsman, one from a bowler, to earn the win.

But fairness, transparency, respect for both talent and for trust placed by a billion people, are all a different matter. When will be find a voice as a nation to condemn this endless chain of corruption, so widespread that even catches are dropped or picked, balls left or nicked, based on how much someone somewhere has bet on it! The maze of corruption seems draw everyone in. I wonder how will we ever succeed as a nation without getting out of this labyrinth?

We will watch it all as it unfolds. Yes, the World Cup 2015, too, we shall watch it as it unfolds. With its dashers and bashers. Mavericks and meritorious. Sons and duds.

Thursday, January 01, 2015

FICTION IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION -- (3): Death with Interruptions by Jose Saramago [translated from Portuguese], Strange Pilgrims by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, (Rhadopis of Nubia by Naguib Mahfouz) [translated from Arabic],

NOVEL / FICTION IN ENGLISH (3):The Tomb of the Twelfth Imam by Richard Bulleit, Grimus by Salman Rushdie, (The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov),

ENGLISH POETRY (1)

POETRY IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION (1): Metamorphosis by OVID [translated by Ralf Humphries], .

Saturday, January 18, 2014

Dust by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor takes you on an elegiac journey,
introducing you to complex personal histories and tragedies. Set in
northern Kenyan's dust, darkness and daylight, this novel is a memoir of
lives transformed by tribal and political conflicts and colonial
processes and imperialistic excesses. The novel presents a tour de force
narrative about lost fathers, brothers, sons and women and descends
into the labyrinth-like individual stories to present a tale of a
family, country, humanity.

A sister Ajany returns to Kenya to
find her brother Odidi. She has seen his corpse, but she seeks a
closure, an understanding of Odidi's life before his tragic end. The
siblings grew up in a dusty Kenyan countryside, in a massive house,
where all the books are inscribed with a name of a foreigner or a
stranger, Hugo Bolton. Their mother Akai is a mysterious women, who has
her own complex narrative of love lost and found, that emerges in bits
and parts as we read the novel. Their father Nyipir is a person who in
one life acquires many incarnations, some as he is forced by his own
needs, greed and wants, and many to just survive Kenya's turbulent
times. Servant of a white man, gravedigger, sepoy, cattle thief,
husband, father, a friend to many smugglers and wanderers, a young man
who wanted to travel to Burma to retrieve his father and brother's
bodies to bury them in their own country. There is a fascinating singer
of water songs, Ali Hida Dada, a policemen whose own complex life
journey crisscrosses through the personal histories of Nyipir, Akai,
Ajany, Odidi and a fifth person, Galgalu who is attached to the
Nyipir-Akai household, like a foster son. Isiah Bolton, a son in search
of a father who disappeared in Kenya. There are a handful of other
characters that complete the list: Justina (Odidi's lady love), Selena
(Isiah's mom), a trader (a keeper of secrets) and Chaudhary (a sly
shopkeeper). Each character is developed with acute sensibility and
sympathy, allowing us to see nuances in their personalities, deceits and
shadows, exposing both bitter and sweet versions of their projected and
veiled selves.

Dust is beautifully written book. As the
narrative advances through present or past, Owour delivers many
remarkable, poetic short sentences. Short sentences and paragraphs that
puncture your thoughts. You gasp before you carry on reading. You gasp
first at the beauty of the wordplay, then you grasp the insight or ache
that each needle-shot sentence releases. The novel emerges in all its
intricate and articulate richness through lives transformed by a recent
colonial experience as well as political upheavals and corruption in an
emergent nation. Perhaps you can appreciate this novel more if you have a
native sympathy with the fate of people scarred by colonial pasts and a
present corrupted, manipulated by economic interests of multinational
companies & their local, vocal, powerful, corrupt collaborators.
Some very heartbreaking episodes fill this novel, some heartrending
scenes, some events that fill you with disgust and disenchantment, and
as a counterpoint, there a few passages that bring peace, understanding,
pleasure, closure.

Growing up in India I always knew this dust
that consumed and subsumed
everything, a dust full of broken promises as well as crushed dreams and
desires,
a dust laced with blood and sweat of the tormented and the tormentors, a
dust we miss when we are away from the nation, a dust that masks and
hides hurt, longing, feeling and thoughts. As a writer, I struggle to
show this dust, capture its prevalence and importance. As a reader, I
seek writing that recognizes it, and removes its veil to reveal
narratives that remain concealed in our plain sight. Owuor excels as she
accomplishes this. In Dust, Owuor delivers a phenomenal saga that
touches upon the human condition, deeply appreciative of sibling and
parental affection, deeply conscious of tacit and long-lasting
friendships, keenly aware of events that shape human destiny. The
opening chapter where Odidi runs and runs, the landscapes through which
various protagonists walk or night sounds they hear, Ajany's search for
her brother's past and especially the scene where she finds the spot on
tarmac still covered with his dried blood... are all crafted with the
skill of a seasoned writer.

The overall story, and the novel's
many exceptional passages, are so beautifully crafted and delivered that
I am convinced that the novel is destined for a long haul, to be read
as a classic by our future generations. After the death of Chinua
Achebe, I ached to find some other voice in the world literature who
could write with his clarity and sympathy about the non-Western world. I
always wondered if Toni Morrison's raw and lucid style can be emulated
in fiction written about men and women who live in erstwhile colonized
countries. To place Owuor's book on a similar pedestal is perhaps the
highest praise I can offer for this work.

Undoubtedly Owuor has
delivered a masterpiece, a work of art that inspires and awes you for it
touches many a raw nerve, and brings to light events, ideas, thoughts
that are too murky to be appreciated otherwise. Though the narrative
unfolds in realms and through descriptions unfamiliar to the imaginative
and everyday life of many readers (my explanation for harsher reviews),
I think Owuor's sparkling writing is capable of awakening many eyes,
hearts and minds to such life-stories. Appreciating the novel Dust does
require examination of our own biases, created by our readings and
upbringings. Perhaps we need more novels like Dust if we really wish to
comprehend the cultural and societal changes taking place in many
non-Western nations. Even if the novel treads through threads far from
your experience and comfort zone, read it for its music, descriptions
and haunting prose and marvel at the author for unraveling secrets of
human condition, secrets only a writer from a distant, dusty nation
knows.

Saturday, January 11, 2014

After he turned thirty, without a breakthrough
or a clue to a Nobel-worthy scientific discovery,
without a bestseller book, a Booker or a Pulitzer,
without even a proper job, with uncertainty
as his daily wake-up call and nightmare,
he began to respect the millions: the also-rans,
the have-beens and the almost-theres, the faceless
ants, and the termites in foreign sweatshops.

He spent an entire week making paper planes
from his unpublished research articles
and poems. Mass circulation of his ideas
using aerodynamics cleared his desk,
ever so cluttered like his mind. Imagine
hundreds of equations and verbs swirling
down to earth like his ideas about science,
art and self! Humbled by the sadhu time,

he grumbled first about the lost rhyme
and reason of his curious, lyrical self.
To this day, he had considered delayed
gratification a virtue. Now a voice,
his own, classed him as a bygone dream.Not every fermentation ends up as wine.
He consoled himself with a serpentine logic
that mediocrity, after a sustained effort

at glory, is thermodynamically the most
favored outcome. He finally forgave
his grandma for saying that grazing goats
educates better than his pricy school's
English rhymes, and tie & coats.
After a half-life of borrowed idioms,
he began seeing his unoriginal affairs
as a destiny of desires forged

by an overhyped education. His toolbox
contains every artifact of acquired fact
and abstract training. Tentatively he prods
on, blowing a longhorn of dote learning,
but now he knows -- creativity is a jackfruit
dessert that not everyone who plants a sapling
gets to taste. To pack his bags and leave
would be an admission of grief or lack of belief

in his talents and the establishment. No,
he must persist, for existence is an act,
and he resents an exact estimation of his self.
He is a mass of clay-dust like everyone else,and immortality is earned by getting churnedin the random eddies of life. Whoever yearns
and stakes his elemental self into the kiln
called life, burns... but only a fraction return

as gold or God, which the mirror suggests
might not be his fate. After he turned forty,
he learned that forgiving faults and failings
helps in retaining self-respect. Outcomesreveal neither neglect nor unworthiness, notalways. Disillusioned by persistent biases
that favor white or black sheep in a flock,
egg-laying hens to an egoistic fighter cock,

he forged for himself a featureless dream-bowl,
then threw it away. To beg or canvass for votes,
or use family connections or political ploys he felt
would destroy his last caricatures of self-respect.But if every man were to forgo his dreams, live on facts,we would regress into a song-less, unchanging universe.
He knows he must persist, for all existence is an act,we are merely players and before the hero/villain is revealed,

all actors on stage (and some backstage) are suspect.
One breakthrough it takes to light a lamp or an epigram,
one breakthrough! He could be but one step away from the finish.They who don't ask will never know if the answer is yes or no.
He refines his act, but he is circumspect. Victors revisebiographies; wipe out the salt of doubts from their cheeks.
Since he knows he could yet write himself into a myth,
he braves the daily grindstones, and hopes, and persists.

--

First published in Muse India, Vol1, Jan-Feb, 2014. Version 1, Nov 25-28, 2011; V2: July 2012...

Vivek is a published poet. He reads & writes in Hindi and English. His poetry and essays in English are published in Poetry, Atlanta Review, The Cortland Review, Kartika
Review, Bateau, Muse India, Reading Hour, etc. He contributes columns and verses to Divya
Himachal (Hindi newspaper in India). Vivek's first collection, "Saga of a Crumpled Piece of
Paper" (63 poems, English, Writers
Workshop, Calcutta) was published in 2009.

Vivek spend his childhood in Himachal Pradesh and undergraduate years in IIT Delhi. He pursued a doctoral degree at Georgia
Tech, Atlanta (2003-2008) and he was a postdoctoral research associate in
Mechanical Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Cambridge (MA) (2008-2012). He currently resides in Chicago.